With COVID-19 spreading globally, the CCP continues its suppression on religious beliefs in secret by using the controlling measures for epidemic prevention, despite being in a state of fighting the epidemic in full swing.
In order to prevent the spread of coronavirus epidemic, cities and villages in every province in China are on lockdown. All villages and residential communities are under closed management, with real name registration for entry and exit demanded.
According to a security individual from a government unit in China’s eastern Shandong Province, since January, working staff of some residential communities have been conducting a sweeping investigation on all the residents every day and reporting the information collected immediately. Those who are not able to open the door to receive investigation in time will be suspected and reported to the police for an arrest.
“The government’s work now is mainly to investigate the believers of God, rather than for the epidemic prevention,” said this security individual. A grass-root government official said that the government was imposing stricter surveillance on believers. The town government convenes meetings on how to arrest believers each month.
Apart from a sweeping investigation on believers, the government searches and arrests Christians by high-tech surveillance tools. Another government insider from a city in Shandong Province revealed that all HD surveillance cameras installed in each district of the city were put to use. Those who go to a specific place regularly will be suspected as believers in God once they are spotted by the police, and the police will conduct surveillance and arrest on them.
In February, a member of The Church of Almighty God (CAG) was suspected and reported by a local resident while moving some personal items out of the residential community where she was living. After she left, government officials traced her whereabouts by retrieving surveillance footage and reported to the police. As a result, this CAG member was arrested.
Reportedly, over 20 CAG members were arrested by the police in February alone in Shandong.
According to the statistics of The Church of Almighty God, in 2019, Shandong government launched at least about 100 arresting campaigns across the province targeting CAG members by the use of HD surveillance cameras and tracking their movement. 924 CAG members were arrested, accounting for 64.3% of the total number of the arrests in the province that year. Among them, many were tracked and monitored for months to a year before being arrested.
The Church of Almighty God is the single most severely persecuted Christian movement in China. According to the 2019 Annual Report on the Chinese Communist Government’s Persecution of The Church of Almighty God, at least 6,000 church members were arrested and 19 persecuted to death.
“According to the CCP’s internal information and its secret documents we have obtained, the CCP government has planned to launch a large-scale unified arrest targeted at The Church of Almighty God in 2020. If it were not for the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, more brothers and sisters would have been arrested,” said a CAG member.
